Up Till Now (7 page)

As it turned out movie producer Pandro S. Berman was producing an epic version of Dostoyevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov
, and had already signed Yul Brynner, Lee J. Cobb, and Claire Bloom. The director was Richard Brooks, who was well known for films like
Blackboard Jungle, The Catered Affair,
and
Something of Value.
Berman happened to see me in “The Defenders” on
Studio One
, and was impressed with my work and my cheekbones, which apparently resembled Brynner’s. The cheekbones, I mean. I was asked to do a screen test, an audition really, and in preparation I read the novel. I know it’s an extraordinary piece of literature but . . .

Oh, this
is
good news. The Biography Channel just called to tell me they’ve decided to produce an interview show I’ve created entitled
Shatner’s Raw Nerve
. Basically, I’m going to interview actors and politicians and ask them about subjects they generally don’t discuss. That’s great. In the same press release the Biography Channel also announced another new show,
Small Medium at Large
, about “a four-foot-tall psychic medium who uses Chinese meditation to commune with the dead.” That’s great, maybe I’ll do a short interview with him. I can just imagine the response from some people when they read this release: “Shatner has an interview show?”

. . . so, I read
The Brothers Karamazov
and I couldn’t make sense of it. It’s very difficult reading. It’s the classic story of a nineteenth-century Russian family ripped apart by money, passion, some patricide, love, and snow. A lot of snow. Eventually I was offered the role of Alexei, the youngest of the four Karamazov brothers. Yul Brynner
was my oldest brother, Dmitri, who was scheming to get our father’s fortune. Lee J. Cobb was our lecherous father, whose character was described in his line, “Each man should die on his own chosen field of battle—mine is bed.”

This was my big break, this role was going to make me a star! While it wasn’t going to make me rich, it would make me financially secure for the first time in my career. Even working as often as I did, I still had not managed to save more than eighteen hundred bucks. That was my goal, to have more than eighteen hundred dollars in the bank, and this role would enable me to do that.

Gloria and I had bought a little sports car, a convertible. We packed all our belongings, put down the top, and drove across America. When we got closer to Los Angeles I put up the top and in that sudden quiet I realized I hadn’t spoken with my wife in four days. That trip put a distance between us that I’m not sure we ever really closed.

We rented an apartment in a complex in Westwood that was popular with people in the entertainment industry. Among them was a beautiful young woman who would sit around the pool all day wearing large sunglasses, always by herself and never talking to anyone. She was so wonderfully mysterious. What was the secret behind this beautiful young woman who never left the building and refused to speak to anyone? Only later did I find out she had been stashed there by Howard Hughes, who never showed up. That was her job, waiting for a man who was never going to arrive. But seeing her there, day after day, fit so perfectly with my image of Hollywood.

This was my initiation to the movie business: as I drove to the M-G-M lot on the morning we were to begin work I thought about my father’s plea that I not become a hanger-on. Five years he’d given me, and here I was literally on my way to becoming a movie star. It was an extraordinary feeling. I pulled up to the front gate and the guard asked for my pass. His name was Ken Hollywood, and I will never forget it. I didn’t have a pass. I was in a major motion picture, I explained, I didn’t need a pass. He looked at his clipboard and shook his head, “You’re not on the list,” he said.

“I’m William Shatner,” I said, and for the dramatic purposes of
this book I’ll assume beads of sweat began forming on my forehead. “You see, I’ve got to be on the set at nine o’clock...”

“You’re not on the list,” he repeated firmly, directing me to make a U-turn and leave M-G-M. I drove all the way back to Westwood and sat in my apartment all morning until the confusion was cleared up. Apparently someone had forgotten to put me on the list. Perhaps that should have given me some idea of my importance in this production.

The Brothers Karamazov
was my first experience on a big-budget film. Most of the television shows I’d done had taken less than a week to complete and the budgets were so small we had to wear our own clothes; the shooting schedule for this movie was several months. From the very beginning what surprised me was the ease with which vast sums of money were spent on things other than the actual production. Lunch cost more than an entire
Playhouse 90
production. The meals, the cars, the perks, the amount of money that was spent on everything but the movie was astonishing. And nobody seemed to even notice.

The process of making this movie had absolutely no relation to any acting experience in my career. It seemed to me that most of the other actors would learn their lines on the set. I was working as I had learned to work: I knew the entire script before I got to Hollywood. To me, that’s the work of acting. Acting is memorizing, absorbing the words and knowing what they mean to the character and how you want to say them. Once you’ve done that, it’s sandbox time. Playtime. What we’re doing is pretending, so let’s go ahead and pretend with the tools we have, the shovel and the pail, or in the actor’s case your lines and your knowledge of the character. But several actors literally would be learning their lines as we were shooting.

Director Richard Brooks was a bit of a perfectionist. I was actually witness to nineteen takes for the word no. It wasn’t me, it was someone else, and it took nineteen takes to get it exactly the way he wanted it. Until that day, I didn’t know there were nineteen different ways to say no. Is that how you want me to say it? No. No? No. You mean no? Yes.

After the first dozen attempts all the pretend has disappeared. By the time you say any word fifteen times you no longer even understand the meaning of the word. It’s just a sound. Do you understand the meaning of the word no? No. Yeah, that’s good.

I played a minor role in the film; mostly my job was to stand in the background looking saintly. The problem with being saintly is that Yul Brynner kept kicking me in the pants. Being new to the movie business I didn’t know exactly what that meant. That’s the entertainment industry, when someone kicks you in the pants it’s not just someone kicking you in the pants. It requires analysis: it might be a show of affection. I like you, therefore I can kick you in the pants to show it; or it might just as easily be a display of anger. I don’t like you at all, so I’m going to kick you in your pants. Or it might even be a demonstration of power. I’m so important that I can kick another actor in the pants and no one will stop me. Or it might even simply be intended as a joke. We’re all so serious and self-important here and what could be sillier than kicking someone in the pants?

I didn’t know what to do. I remember knowing how demeaning it was but not how to respond. He was the star of the movie and I wanted to be successful and I believed he could make or break me. So I didn’t know whether to say, “Mr. Brynner, would you mind not kicking me in the pants?” Or ask him, “Would you like to kick me in the pants again?” I was torn between those two responses and a third, which is really what I wanted to do. I wanted to punch him out.

Well, he was in pretty good shape too. So for the rest of the film I did my best to keep my pants out of the way of his foot. And I learned a very important lesson that I have followed throughout my career: don’t kick other actors in the pants.

Later in life, when Yul Brynner had cancer and was making his final tour in
The King and I
, I went to see him. He was very affectionate in his emotional memory. He remembered a wonderful shoot. All I remember is getting kicked in the pants. The film received very nice notices.
Variety
wrote: “Shatner has the difficult task of portraying youthful male goodness, and he does it with such gentle candor
it is effective.” In other words, I was very good at portraying being very good.

At the same time I was learning how to be married. Supposedly it was Sir Donald Wolfit who said on his deathbed, “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.” Well, compared to being married, comedy was easy. I had no experience in the great art of living with another person. The great surprise of marriage is that the other person is always there, and has needs and desires that are often in conflict with your own—and sometimes, may actually be right. Everything I knew about marriage came from my mother and my father, and they never raised their voices to each other. Gloria knew how to have an argument; I didn’t. Instead of raising my voice and flailing my arms I remember feeling that her actions were unjustified. I didn’t understand how someone could love you and still yell at you. So from time to time I was set right back on my heels.

What I didn’t know how to do was put myself in somebody else’s shoes. Or more specifically, someone else’s high heels. I always thought of myself as being sympathetic and loving and kind. But I didn’t think of myself as wrong. It has taken me four marriages to understand the part I have to play in a marriage and to learn how to do it.

The challenge to me with Gloria was to not scream back. But finally, I let myself go just a little and I found myself yelling. Well, listen to me. I can do that, I can yell just as loudly as she can. Isn’t that a surprise. I hadn’t known that part of me existed. One thing didn’t change, though: I still believed that if you really loved another person you couldn’t shout at them—like I was doing. Which led directly to the inevitable and dangerous thought: well, maybe there’s no love here.

Even after my first starring role in a movie I still considered myself a stage actor. Movies and television were the things a stage actor did between great parts. So when I was to audition for the male lead in a new play written by Paul Osborn, being produced by David Merrick and directed by Joshua Logan, I desperately wanted the part. I don’t remember too many auditions, but this one I will never forget. By the
time I got back to New York I had memorized the entire script, I knew all my lines. As I started to say the words, I dramatically threw down the script and continued.

Josh Logan told me later, “That’s what got you the part. That you had the panache to do that, the arrogance, the bravado. It was perfect for the character.”

The World of Suzie Wong
was the show that was going to make me a star! Merrick, Osborn, Logan, and Shatner, that was it. My problem was that I was under contract to M-G-M. Before giving me the part in
The Brothers Karamazov
the studio had insisted I sign a multi-picture deal. If that picture made me a star, they wanted to own me. I didn’t know how I was going to get out of that deal.

Fortunately, the first of many projects that were going to make me a star had not made me a star. A year earlier, for the first time in its history, M-G-M had lost money and was actually trying to get rid of its contract players. If they were letting actors like Paul Newman go, they certainly weren’t going to fight to keep William Shatner. I suspect that when I officially requested to be released from my contract executives must have leaped in the air and started cheering.

Ken Hollywood didn’t even wave good-bye. I didn’t mind, I was going to New York again to be a star.

I’ve
faced death several times in my life. I hunted a brown bear, one of the most ferocious of all animals, armed with only a bow and arrow. I had become an archer while making the movie
Alexander the Great
. I loved archery; I reveled in the beauty of the recurved bow and the perfectly balanced arrow. Hitting a target with a handmade bow is truly an art. I had practiced and became proficient at it. I had hunted deer and a pig, so when the TV show
American Sportsman
asked me to hunt a brown bear in Alaska with a bow and arrow it seemed like an exciting adventure.

I had no concept of what I was getting into. Somewhere in my mind was the thought that I don’t get hurt, only the stuntmen get hurt. I think I began realizing that wasn’t precisely true as we got off the airplane in Anchorage, Alaska, and watched as two men on stretchers were carried out of a small plane and rushed into an ambulance which immediately raced off with sirens wailing. What was that all about, I asked a guard, and he explained grimly, “They got mauled by grizzlies.” Someone else told me about a large World War II Quonset hut whose entire rear wall was covered by the skin of a giant grizzly. And I heard stories about an Indian village that had been ripped apart by a maddened grizzly that had killed twelve people. The grizzly bear is an astonishingly powerful animal. Over a short span it is faster than a racehorse, it can break a caribou’s back with a single swipe of its paw, and when threatened it attacks.

The brown bear is larger and more savage than the grizzly bear. The brown bear can be nine feet tall and weigh as much as a thousand pounds. I had my bow and arrow.

We flew up to the Aleutian Islands. This was actually more complicated and dangerous than an ordinary hunt—and I’d just seen the results of an ordinary hunt carried off an airplane. This was a hunt for television. Meaning that the camera crew had to be standing directly behind me and get the entire sequence in a single shot. The “kill shot” it was called. If the audience didn’t see my arrow hitting the bear, we believed, then people might suspect it had been edited. In addition to myself, our team consisted of two two-man camera crews and a professional guide armed with a high-powered rifle.

We lived in a shack on the riverbank for ten days, which was more than long enough for me to begin to question my sanity for doing this. Is there anything more horrific than the thought of this mammoth creature eating you alive? Not knocking you unconscious, not starting at your throat, but ripping at your entrails with his huge claws while you’re conscious. Bears kill by scooping out your insides; you don’t die right away. I started having nightmares about how I was going to react at the moment this animal reared up and looked at me and I had to shoot. One shot, that’s all I was going to get.
There was no stuntman, no retakes, just me armed with a bow and a single arrow. This was crazy. That bear did not know that I was only an actor.

What am I doing here? I wondered every day. Finally, after ten days we were radioed that a bear was coming in our direction. It had been spotted from an airplane, which was against the law, but this was American television. We waited along the riverbed. The far side of the riverbed was covered with a line of trees and bushes, and beyond that was limitless tundra. We didn’t talk very much, I think the other members of the crew were just as nervous as I was.

It was late fall. I was dressed in a bulky parka. I’d never shot an arrow dressed like that and it was awkward. As we waited the guide indicated a copse of low trees with very thick brambles. The bear was moving through the root system, staying in the cover. I looked, but I couldn’t see it. There was a break in the tree line and there he was. “Here’s what he’s going to do,” the guide whispered. “He’ll come close to the middle of the tree line and stand up on two legs at the edge and look around. If he doesn’t spot us or sense us, he’ll get down on all fours and come toward us. If he knows we’re here, he’ll run for the tundra, the open.”

I was shaking. One shot. I’m an actor, I’m an actor. Finally he moved into the open and stood up. This was the most magnificent and terrifying creature I had ever seen, it was almost prehistoric. He was forty yards from us and only at that moment did I truly appreciate the hell I’d put myself into. Only then did I have to face my fears.

He lowered himself onto all fours and began coming toward us. But instead of coming across the river he dropped into the bed, which was about two feet below the level of the land. I could see his back moving diagonally across the horizon in front of me. Totally instinctively—I certainly couldn’t have been thinking—I moved out into the open and ran toward the bear. The cameramen were running right behind me. My arrow was cocked. The bear turned away from me at a right angle, giving me a very small target, but while on the run I lifted my bow and launched my arrow. I watched
it fly as if it were on a towline. It seemed to drive right into the bear. But the bear continued running; he turned and ran right back into the woods.

It took me only a few seconds to realize that we were only twenty or thirty yards from a wounded bear. We didn’t know what he was doing. The guide raised his rifle and swept the area, waiting for him to spring out of the tree line at us. We heard him crashing through the thick foliage, but then that sound stopped. The guide said softly, as if we were in a movie rather than on a TV show, “We got ourselves a bad bear.” Nobody moved; we believed we were being stalked by a desperate animal.

We sat where we were, waiting in complete silence. Well, silence except for the deafening sound of my heart beating. Unlike a bullet, which kills on impact, an arrow is essentially three or four razor blades and it kills by cutting, so a shot animal lies down and bleeds to death.

A wounded animal waits to attack. We waited in place for about a half hour and then the guide walked into the woods to search for that bear. The camera crews were behind him. They found the dead bear in the bushes. In the sunlight, with the shadows of the branches moving across this giant animal’s back, it looked as if it were still alive and that alone was terrifying. We poked at it to make certain it was dead.

At that moment I changed from being a hunter to someone who will catch a fly and let it loose out a window. I have never shot at any living creature again. Looking at that magnificent animal, the amazing stupidity of what I’d done just humbled me. I realized that to destroy life was to destroy part of myself. The vanity of it, the idiocy of it, but until I faced that bear it had nothing at all to do with courage.

Which brings us to being onstage with the very beautiful France Nuyen in
The World of Suzie Wong.
Gloria and I moved back to New York and we bought a little house in Hastings-on-Hudson for nineteen thousand dollars. This was an amazing step for me, this was roots. For an actor, that kind of commitment can be terrifying. But I was confident I could afford it, I was going to be paid $750 a week to star in a Broadway show. That was a tremendous amount of money
in 1958. My name was going to be above the title, WILLIAM SHATNER IN... It was in lights, WILLIAM SHATNER IN... I remember when the titles first went up on the marquee. I walked up and down West 44th Street just looking at it, and then I went back at night to see it all lit up.

Of course I knew the risks. A Broadway show can open and close in one night. If you get enough bad reviews you clean out your dressing room the next morning. If that happened I would be paid one-seventh of my weekly salary, so I’d get a hundred dollars for my performance and a hearty handshake. And the mortgage would still be due at the end of the month.

But I wasn’t worried about that. I was working with Broadway royalty: Merrick, Osborn, and Josh Logan. Logan had directed shows like
Mister Roberts
and
South Pacific
and
Fanny
and
Annie Get Your Gun;
he’d won a Pulitzer Prize and a year earlier had been nominated for an Oscar for directing
Sayonara
. Merrick had produced
Fanny
and
The Matchmaker
. Paul Osborn had written the Broadway classic
Morning’s at Seven
as well as the screenplays for
East of Eden
and
South Pacfiic
. Their names on the marquee had been enough to generate the first million-plus-dollar advance ticket sale for a drama in Broadway history. A lot of that money had come from a new Broadway phenomenon: suburban theater groups, large groups of people who purchased blocks of tickets before a show opened based on word of mouth. In our case I suspect some of them mistakenly believed they were buying tickets for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s new musical,
Flower Drum Song,
which was opening across the street. But I couldn’t have been more confident. Hello, Broadway, here I come. I was Mr. Broadway, I got the town by the tail.

I don’t remember precisely when I knew
The World of Suzie Wong
was a complete disaster. It might have been during rehearsals, when my co-star, France Nuyen, stopped speaking to Josh Logan so he stopped coming to rehearsals. Or it might have been early in our run, when I had that unfortunate fistfight onstage with a member of the cast who swung at me and missed, accidentally coldcocking an eighty-six-year-old prop man. Or it might have been that night early
in the run when I heard a member of the audience whisper loudly, “Will you still love me after this?”

Merrick and Logan must have known, they were too smart and experienced not to have known; my guess is that by the time they realized that they were about to launch the
Titanic
of Broadway shows there was too much advance money in the box office to close it. The problems began with France Nuyen, who only three years earlier had been working in France as a seamstress when she was discovered on a beach by
Life
photographer Philippe Halsman. Almost immediately after arriving in America Josh Logan cast her in the movie version of
South Pacific
, which was great because the character she played spoke only pidgin English. Based on her success, he offered her the lead role of a Chinese prostitute in
Suzie Wong
.

France Nuyen was absolutely gorgeous, I mean people were just thunderstruck by her beauty. She would have been a great star in still pictures or in a wax museum, but on Broadway actors have to move and talk and express emotion—all of which is very difficult for an actress who doesn’t speak English. She had learned all her lines phonetically. Much of the time she didn’t understand the emotional meaning of the words she was speaking. She knew absolutely nothing about being onstage. As far as I knew, she had never even seen a Broadway show.

The World of Suzie Wong
was a love story set in Hong Kong. I played a Canadian artist who falls in love with a Chinese prostitute and tries to reform her. We opened to universally tepid reviews. If theater groups hadn’t been invented we would have closed the next morning, but we were sold out for three months so Merrick kept the show open. The audience just hated the show. There is an old joke that applied to this show: the audience was moved by our performance—entire rows would literally stand up in the middle of the show and walk out. These people had decided that standing on a Manhattan corner in the winter, waiting for the bus that was to take them back to suburbia, was preferable to watching our show.

I felt like I was watching my career walk out the door. I was desperate. But just when it seemed like the situation could not possibly
get any worse, the bear stood up on its hind legs! It was monstrous. France Nuyen was the most remarkably naïve young woman—who at the same time was tremendously arrogant. It was a street arrogance, a defense mechanism that expressed itself as anger. I’d never seen anything quite like it. If she was crossed in any way she would become furious. It’s the kind of emotion an experienced actor might have used in her performance, but she just got angry. I don’t quite remember how Josh Logan had crossed her, but after that she refused to speak to him. Not only wouldn’t she talk to him, she said if Logan even came into the theater and stood in the rear she would stop talking. The audacity of that—this little girl had ordered the king of Broadway out of the theater! Although truthfully, I suspect Logan was thrilled. Saving this show was beyond even his prodigious talent. I, however, had a two-year contract. I had to be onstage with her every night.

One night shortly after we opened I spoke my line and waited for her response. There is a very old tradition in the theater: when the playwright has gone to all the trouble of writing a line, the actor is supposed to say it. It’s not optional. She was sitting in a chair, staring at the audience—absolutely silent. She wouldn’t speak. Apparently, in the dimly lit theater she thought she saw Logan standing in the back. After a few seconds I ad-libbed something, well, what I really meant to say was... and again I waited. Once again, she didn’t say a word. I made up something else. For an actor this was considerably worse than forgetting your own lines, at least in that situation there’s hope that someone will feed them to you. But this...In that situation you do whatever you have to do to survive. You take a deep breath and start talking. At one point I wandered offstage and asked the stage manager what to do. The stage manager, who was supervising the play in Josh Logan’s absence, shrugged his shoulders. I wandered back onstage and kept talking. Finally, mercifully, the curtain came down, ending the act.